The Republican Party, in the act of updating its plagiarism machine, has renewed its commitment to the perpetration of letter fraud against newspapers across the country.
From the fall of 2005 to the end of winter 2007, plagiarized letters to the editor — written by a Republican Party P.R. hack but assigned the names of everyday Americans in claims of authorship — flooded through the offices of our nation’s newspapers like a nasty sewer backup. During that period, the official website of the Republican Party provided the following text for people to send out under the false pretense that the words were actually their own:
President Bush has a clear plan for victory in Iraq that begins with training Iraqi forces so they can defend their country and fight the terrorists. We are making tremendous progress towards this objective. Earlier this year, Iraqi forces led the fight in clearing out terrorists during the crucial battle of Tal Afar, with U.S. troops in a supporting role, and every day, Iraqis are taking more control of the situation on the ground. Withdrawing from Iraq, as some Democrats in Washington propose, would send a dangerous signal to our enemies that we cut and run when the going gets tough. President Bush is offering a clear strategy to win, not a political quick fix.
As of this month, that text is no longer available for the Republicans to use in their plagiarism operations.
I’d like to say that’s because the Republican Party no longer believes in the use of plagiarism to further its political goals, but alas, no, that’s not the case. The Republican Party just finally realized that the battle of Tal Afar took place in 2005, not “earlier this year,” and changed the text. Here’s the new version:
President Bush has a clear plan for victory in Iraq that begins with training Iraqi forces so they can defend their country and fight the terrorists. We are making tremendous progress towards this objective. Withdrawing from Iraq, as Democrats in Washington propose, would send a dangerous signal to our enemies that we cut and run when the going gets tough. President Bush is offering a clear strategy to win, not a political quick fix.
Taken out is the claim that “every day, Iraqis are taking more control of this situation on the ground,” and there just isn’t any example of military success in Iraq to supplant the old short-term success of Tal Afar. Otherwise, the letter is just the same. This website intervention with the goal of adapting a particular text but not ending the plagiarism of that text is a reiteration of the Republican Party’s commitment to spread its message through the enabling of letter fraud. We’re still left with a Republican plagiarism machine, one that, despite the protestations of its architect, is clearly meant to be a cut and paste operation. That’s what the little javascript buttons reading “Add text to letter” are for.
And sadly, this public relations poison from the Republican Party continues to seep into the nation’s papers. The Press Republican of Northeastern New York published the plagiarized letter in its new form, under the falsely claimed authorship of Technical Sgt. Joseph Sweet Burke, on March 7.
So, they took out “every day, Iraqis are taking more control of this situation on the ground”, huh?
Looks like an implicit admission of failure to me.
Fuck you asshole.
I did write my own letter to the Hudson WI newspaper.
You really are stupid. That’s why the Reps are going to eat your lunch this November.
Actually, you should have written “Fuck, you asshole.” As in “fuck, you found out I didn’t actually write that letter.” Sure, you signed your name to it. But you didn’t write the rest of it. You just didn’t.